ReviewAn Overview of Translationally Informed Treatments for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Animal Models of Pavlovian Fear Conditioning to Human Clinical Trials
Section snippets
Pharmacotherapy Approaches to Fear- and Anxiety-Related Disorders
The following sections review preclinical and clinical evidence for a variety of established and emerging pharmacotherapies, especially focusing on underlying transmitter and receptor systems, as well as targeted brain regions. In discussing the preclinical data, we focus on outlining evidence from studies of cued and contextual fear conditioning but include discussion of evidence from alternative fear and anxiety paradigms where relevant.
Device-Based Treatments
Increasingly, researchers are investigating device-based treatments to alter pathological brain activity and connectivity in psychiatric disease. A number of different stimulation tools—including DBS, vagus nerve stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)—are under investigation and each are at various stages of development and testing at the preclinical and clinical levels (222, 223). Similar to traditional pharmaceutical drugs,
Discussion
We have examined the evidence regarding efficacy of some specific treatment strategies for PTSD informed by rodent preclinical studies. We have focused on Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction experiments in animals, which allow researchers to model aversive learning processes that may underlie development of PTSD in response to trauma, as well as extinction of pathological fear via exposure therapy. Even in prior stress models, which are thought to more thoroughly model PTSD, fear
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
Support was provided by National Institutes of Health (T32-GM08605, 1F31MH097397, and R01MH096764), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and by an National Institutes of Health/National Center for Research Resources base grant (P51RR000165) to Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
Dr. Ressler is a founding member of Extinction Pharmaceuticals/Therapade Technologies to develop D-cycloserine, a generically available compound, for use to augment the effectiveness of psychotherapy. He has received no
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